In this topic, you will learn about tools that Brightcove Learning Services provides to help you test and learn the Brightcove RESTful APIs.

List of tools

The following tools are discussed in this guide:

A shell script that can be run from the command line if you are working on MacOS or some other UNIX or LINUX system, or if you have cURL installed on a Windows system

An online testing tool that should work in any browser

A guide to using the popular Postman REST API Tester

These tools can be used to test any request to any of the following Brightcove APIs:

Analytics API

Audience API

CMS API

Dynamic Ingest API

Ingest Profiles API

Player Management API

The shell script (cURL)

The command-line tool is a shell script called api-tester.sh to get access tokens and make the API calls. The api-tester script uses cURL to make http calls. cURL is built in on Mac MacOS and all Unix/Linux systems. To get cURL on Windows, see Setting up cURL. Then download the api-tester.sh script

The full API call (example: https://cms.api.brightcove.com/v1/accounts/12345678/videos

The request verb - one of the following: GET | POST | PATCH | PUT | DELETE (GET is the default)

Request data - used for POST, PATCH, and PUT; for GET and DELETE requests, you will leave this blank and just press return

The command-line tool will return the same response as the online tool - however, it also echoes the full response, which allows you to see the headers and more information if the request fails for some reason. It also echos the raw JSON for the response as well as a pretty-printed version.

The online tool

The online testing tool can be found at here. Like the command-line tool, it asks you for: